The fentanyl crisis in North America is not just a drug problem—it is deeply intertwined with a sophisticated international money laundering operation. As President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth increasingly succeed in clamping down on the southern border, multiple federal and state law enforcement sources anticipate an increase in illicit border-crossing activities at the U.S.-Canadian border, including Maine’s northeastern border and relatively unguarded coastline.
In the following investigative report, Sam Cooper exposes the vast networks linking Chinese Triads, Mexican cartels, and Canadian financial systems in a transnational crime web that fuels the illicit drug trade. Cooper’s reporting reveals that these criminal enterprises leverage a complex technique known as trade-based money laundering (TBML) to wash billions of dollars through legitimate industries, including real estate, luxury vehicles, and commodities markets. According to Cooper’s reporting, Chinese Triads operating in Vancouver and Toronto serve as key intermediaries, laundering cartel drug proceeds by exploiting Canada’s weak enforcement mechanisms. These illicit funds then circle back to finance further fentanyl and methamphetamine production, which floods into the United States.
One of the most alarming aspects of Cooper’s reporting is the alleged collusion between crime networks and elements within the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front—a foreign influence operation suspected of facilitating illegal financial flows. Maine Wire reporting us found evidence of United Front influence in Maine associated with the illegal marijuana trafficking operations populating the rural parts of the state, including at drug houses in close proximity to U.S. military bases. Cooper’s sources within Canadian and U.S. law enforcement assert that the failure of Canadian authorities to crack down on these networks has made the country a primary conduit for narco-financing, drawing increasing scrutiny from American officials.
Cooper’s investigative report also highlights the role of high-profile financial crimes, including the collapse of Canada’s largest-ever money laundering probe, “E-Pirate,” which targeted underground banking services used by Triads. Despite overwhelming evidence, Canadian law enforcement has struggled to prosecute these cases due to systemic weaknesses in criminal enforcement and prosecution.
Cooper’s report ultimately suggests that the fentanyl crisis is inseparable from international trade policies, as money laundering via legitimate goods and businesses underpins the entire narcotics supply chain. The report helps to explain why the United States, under President Trump, has introduced aggressive trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico, viewing them not just as economic measures but as counterattacks against criminal networks embedded within global commerce.
Read an excerpt from The Bureau here and visit his Substack:
VANCOUVER and TORONTO — As debate rages over President Donald Trump’s disruptive tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China—whether they represent a genuine war on fentanyl deaths tied to each nation’s role in the deadly supply chain, or merely a pretext for U.S. trade dominance—multiple Canadian and U.S. government sources have stepped forward to highlight a factor they believe North American citizens aren’t grasping amid Trump’s political rhetoric.
They point to the staggering scale and sophistication of trade-based money laundering orchestrated by Chinese Triads in Canada and Mexican cartels. This is a predominant concern in Canada, alongside revelations of so-called fentanyl superlabs hidden in rural areas, yet easily supplied by Canadian transportation hubs—shipping, rail, and trucking networks saturated with organized crime. These sources insist this little-understood form of criminal money laundering not only fuels fentanyl trafficking—ultimately linked to a complicit Beijing—but directly finances drug shipments initiated by Chinese networks in Toronto and Vancouver, sending fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine across the Mexican border into California, specifically to trucking hubs around Los Angeles.
According to the primary source—a Canadian expert familiar with what they classify as an intricate trilateral partnership between Chinese Triads, the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front foreign influence networks, and Latin American cartels—these economic networks have effectively infiltrated multiple industries and commodities markets on Canada’s and Mexico’s west coasts, using them to conceal and amplify proceeds from fentanyl transactions.
In 2023, Canada’s financial watchdog,Fintrac, reported that Chinese networks had evolved beyond traditional casino-based laundering methods in Vancouver and Toronto, now mastering laundering through Canadian banks, law offices, real estate, and diaspora-based fraud networks. Yet according to The Bureau’s criminal intelligence source, these same networks—operating alongside the Sinaloa Cartel—also traffic in a range of commodities, from poached wildlife and agricultural staples like avocados and limes to rare Chinese delicacies such as geoduck, a phallic-shaped clam prized in hot pot and believed to have aphrodisiac properties.
The same source contends that while Canadian government agencies—including the RCMP, Fintrac, CBSA, and CSIS—understand the key players in the fentanyl trade, systemic issues within Canadian policing and prosecution allow these networks to operate with near impunity:
“The RCMP knows they have no framework within the Criminal Code, no resources, and no support from prosecution services. They just have no ability. And this whole thing with Trudeau saying that only 43 kilos of fentanyl—less than one percent—is coming from Canada is such a joke. It’s the interweaving of trade-based money laundering—if the public knew, it would blow their minds. I believe the U.S. government and Trump know it, and that’s why he’s doing what he’s doing.”
Put another way, what this expert and others argue is that the drug and trade wars engulfing the United States and China are not polarities—they are a single, intertwined conflict, with trade-based money laundering as the critical convergence. And the growing concern—that Canadian and Mexican governments might be benefiting from this illicit trade, perhaps even to the point of complicity—cannot be entirely dismissed.
The exposure of Canada’s prime minister to money laundering networks presents a layer of intrigue and troubling optics, likely recognized in Washington, according to four sources across Canada.
The primary source for this story—reinforcing explosive claims by other Canadian police experts in a recent investigation by The Bureau—provided specific new details, identifying major money laundering networks in Vancouver of concern to U.S. authorities. Among them were high-profile suspects openly acknowledged at a fundraising event attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Specifically, the source identified Chinese individuals who had entered Canada on a private jet flagged by a U.S. government agency, which asked the RCMP to surveil them in Vancouver. These suspects were linked to a commercial real estate investor in Vancouver with direct ties to Beijing, and to organized crime figures connected to Beijing’s United Front in Canada.
The same individuals, notorious in elite Canadian enforcement circles, appeared in suspicious transaction reports and were central to a sweeping police intelligence investigation into vulnerabilities in Canada’s banking system. This investigation, known as Project Athena, was a major anti-gang initiative examining reports from Canada’s financial intelligence agency, Fintrac. Project Athena emerged after the collapse of its predecessor case, E-Pirate—reportedly Canada’s largest-ever drug money laundering probe—which targeted Chinese underground bankers in Vancouver and Toronto linked to the Sam Gor network, a Chinese syndicate dominated by the 14K, Big Circle, and Sun Yee On Triads.
As part of Project Athena, investigators uncovered a single money service bureau in Hong Kong that moved CAD $973 million over three years, primarily through Canadian banks. Several United Front and Triad-linked suspects from earlier investigations were tied to these transactions.
“That famous picture of Trudeau at a Vancouver dinner with all those Chinese guys—the ones we all know from various media reports? They’re all in there. They’re all in there moving money around,” the source said. “And this was just one money service bureau. Nearly a billion dollars in three years. So how many others are there?”
Read the rest of The Bureau’s reporting here.
All the more reason to stick with Trump.
Lots of money being made by NGO’s. Just like the war on poverty, the progressives do not want it to end.